10.
Mark Twain, “From theLondon Times of 1904”, 1898 ...and he now took the fancy that he would like to have the telelectroscope and divert his mind with it. He had his wish. The connection was made with the international telephone-station, and day by day, and night by night, he called up one corner of the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and studied its strange sights, and spoke with its people, and realized that by grace of this marvelous instrument he was almost as free as the birds of the air, although a prisoner under lock and bars. He seldom spoke to me, and I never interrupted him when he was absorbed in his amusement. I sat in his parlor and read and smoked, and the nights were very quiet and reposefully sociable, and I found them pleasant. Now and then I would hear him say, "Give me Yedo"; next, "Give me Hong Kong"; next, "Give me Melbourne." And I smoked on, and read in comfort, while he wandered about the remote underworld, where the sun was shining in the sky, and the people were at their daily work. Sometimes the talk that came from those far regions through the microphone attachment interested me, and I listened.

11.
Arthur C. Clarke, “BBCHorizon”, 1964I am thinking of the incredible breakthrough which has been made possible bydevelopments in communications, particularly the transistor and - above all - thecommunication satellite. These things will make possible a world in which we can be ininstant contact with each other, wherever we may be; where we can contact ourfriends everywhere on earth even if we do not know their actual physicallocation. It will be possible, in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man toconduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London. In fact, ifit proved worthwhile, almost any executive skill, any administrative skill, even manyphysical skills could be made independent of distance.I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons inEdinburgh operating in patients in New Zealand. When that time comes, the wholeworld would have shrunk to a point and the traditional role of a city as themeeting place for man would have ceased to make any sense. In fact, men willno longer commute, they will communicate. They won’t have to travel distance anymore; they’d only travel for pleasure.

33.
What the future will look like Digital technologies will be woven throughout our daily lives to a level where they are another essential service, just as electricity or clean water are today

34.
IDC, “Digital UniverseStudy”, 2010 A study on the amount of digital information created and replicated in the world 75% of our digital world is a copy (25% is unique) 2010: 1.2 zettabytes (1.2 trillion gigabytes) A stack of DVDs stretching to the moon and back 2020: 35 zettabytes (35 trillion gigabytes) A stack of DVDs reaching halfway to Mars

37.
Storage capacities Latest memory storage drives can hold 2-3 terabytes Every 15 years, capacity increases roughly by 1000 Paul Reber (Northwestern University) estimated the storage of a human brain to be around 2500 terabytes in a 2010 Scientiﬁc American piece Other estimates vary this up or down by a factor of 1000 Would require 1000 x 2.5 terabyte drives to store a brain Not unreasonable to imagine we could store a brain’s capacity on a ‘memory’ drive by 2025

38.
Processing capacitiesEstimates for the brain are that it can carry outanywhere from 1016 ﬂops (ﬂoating point operations persecond) to 1019 ﬂopsCurrent supercomputers operate at 2.5 x 1015 ﬂopsUsing Moore’s Law, we may have supercomputerscapable of human brain simulation by 2025 (1019 ﬂops) By 2040, this grows to 5 x 1022 ﬂops (= 5000 people)

39.
The brain is more than just storageand processing: consciousness Interesting article on this topic in today’s Guardian newspaper http://bit.ly/ brainappleyard Review of “The Brain is Wider than the Sky” by Bryan Appleyard

40.
Ray Kurzweil, “By 2040 you will be ableto upload your brain...”, TheIndependent, 2009 In 2040, by his estimation, we will be able to upload the human brain to a computer, capturing “a persons entire personality, memory, skills and history”! (And upload to brains?)